Developers’ Weblog

So the uppercase eszett – ‘ẞ’ (or ‘ẞ’ if your monospace font
has it) – is now an ISO
10646 standard. Your favourite BSD has been one of the first to add
support for it to libc, a (contributed) keyboard layout, and even Markus
Kuhn’s fixed-misc Unicode fonts, after the proposal with a real codepoint
assignment came out. Not all Germans, nor typographers, but historicians,
might like it, the discussion has been flamewar-like. But we knew
this all along.

Ah, by the way. No, we aren’t dead. Websites are irrelevant, but if you
end up here, please read about mksh
anyway. Real questions are asked on the
mailing lists or in IRC. And we don’t
have a handbook (yet), because with two developers, nobody has yet had
enough spare time to write one, plus you’d need a couple of handbooks – one
for people coming from Open/NetBSD (Lite-based), one for people coming from
Free/DragonFly/MidnightBSD (386BSD-based), one for people coming from Unix®,
one for the Apple followers, one for the GNU/Leenocksers, etc. You see?

And while here: Xcode 3.1 (on gecko2@’s Macbook) comes with llvm-gcc… but
not in /usr/bin/ but in /Developer/usr/bin/. It compiles
quickly, produces fast and small code… kind of nice. If Apple brings LLVM+clang
into a usable shape to replace our gcc 3.4.6 (gcc4 has unsafe optimisations
that cannot be turned off, and all other compilers produce bigger code,
which breaks the installation media (especially floppies) and SPARC
kernels), in a form usable as compact command-line compilers (and not just
libraries for Xcode integration), I’ll be happy. (They’d just need to add
mksh to Mac OSX then to make me even happier, but I guess I’m sort of late
with that request. Even if it’s fully free – in contrast to GNU bash – and,
in its most recent incarnations, even advertising clause free.)